Is this a straight forward lie?

Got in this lunchtime to find this Lib Dem leaflet on the doorstep. Have a read of what they’ve written.

Hmmmm….

Problem is Lib Dems, I’m a bit of an electoral geek, and I don’t think that the 7th seat in the East of England region in 2004 went to the Conservatives. Let’s have a look at the actual results shall we?

Eastern [Party List System] – (7 Seats)

Con

465526

30.82%

(3 Seats)

UKIP

296160

19.61%

(2 Seats)

Lab

244929

16.21%

(1 Seat)

Lib Dem

211378

13.99%

(1 Seat)

Independent (Martin Bell)

93028

6.15%

Green

84068

5.56%

BNP

65557

4.34%

English Democrats

26807

1.77%

Respect

13904

0.92%

Independent (John James Naisbitt)

5137

0.34%

Pro Life Alliance

3730

0.24%

Now of course, for Euro elections we use the d’Hondt system, so the seats were carved out as follows.

Robert Kay

Con

465526

(Seat 1)

Jeffrey Titford

UKIP

296160

(Seat 2)

Richard Howitt

Lab

244929

(Seat 3)

James Samuels

Con

232763

(Seat 4)

Andrew Duff

Lib Dem

211378

(Seat 5)

Adrian Key

Con

155175

(Seat 6)

Tom Wise

UKIP

148080

(Seat 7)

Beth Kelly

Lab

122465

Gloria Mereclew

Con

116382

Chris White

Lib Dem

105689

Martin Bell

Ind

93028

Margaret Wright

Green

84068

What did the leaflet say?

“The election for the final seat in the East of England will be a close finish between electing another hard-working Liberal Democrat in Linda Jack, or a fourth Conservative”

Really? The figures say otherwise. The figures show that the seventh seat was won by a UKIP candidate and that the person who missed out was a Labour candidate. The Lib Dems and the Conservatives didn’t even come close to getting the seventh seat. In fact, in order to have been challenging for that seventh seat the Lib Dems would have had to have polled an extra 90,000 votes, around 6% of the voters.

Is this kind of thing allowed? The Lib Dem leaflet is a total misrepresentation of the last Euro vote.

The Tech Stuff

Two Final Things

No one could describe
the Word of the Father;
but when He took flesh from you, O Theotokos,
He consented to be described, and restored the fallen image to its former beauty.
We confess and proclaim our salvation in word and image.
Kontakion of the Triumph of Orthodoxy